It's certainly not the prettiest dungeon, or most atmospheric. I generally hate "Womb/Stomache Levels" in games.
Ruto herself is actually fine imo. It’s just a combination of the prevalence of electrifying enemies, more obtuse puzzles than usual, and just a generally hideous, offputting design that make this dungeon an absolute chore for me
I would have to start making videos to fill the gap. I'm too lazy and I actually find screen capturing boring, though editing is super fun. Is the reason Jabu Jabu Belly being your least favorite the fact its an escort mission and the dungeon is designed to be incredibly frustrating with sink holes and maze like nonsense before that part? You're not going to hear me argue. I honestly think it's more annoying than the Water Temple.
Well, I think you’ve found a niche to fill them Personally aside from a few reviewers (like Yahtzee and Buns, whom you’ve mentioned yourself), I actually stray away from most of gaming YouTube. A lot of it for me just boils down to people wanking off games they’ve put on a pedestal from playing them since childhood and I’m really thirsty for videos that actually analyze games in a critical manner from a more cultural lens. Basically stuff like Lindsay Ellis, Jack Saint and the like do for other pop culture stuff. The only person that actually comes close to that imo is Super Bunnyhop, who I feel actually makes meaningful commentary and actually influences the discourse. But then even he started out with videos like why LTTP is worse than OoT in the usual self-indulgent way these game-related videos tend to go. In semi-unrelated news, today I was reminded why Jabu Jabu’s Belly is my absolute least favorite dungeon in the entire series
I am very disappointed in YouTube's Final Fantasy/Classic RPG discussion videos. I feel all the high quality Zelda, Dark Souls, and Silent Hill videos have made me too bias in terms of the quality I expect. I've watched like three FFVI retrospective videos and most of them just feel like an overview of what the game was as opposed to delivering any kind of real information. Hell I just got halfway through a really obnoxious Mana retrospective video where the guy largely trashed the games cause you can tell he cut his teeth on more modern games. His best comment for the combat system was "at least it's not turn-based combat" which got grating after he kept cutting in weird side gags like he was trying to be like SuperButterBuns or Yahtzee. Still, it's a bit disheartening that most of these videos I find feel like quick reviews rather than actually detailing some interesting info.
I feel more like the later games simply moved away from sentient crystals being an important plot point for awhile. Really only FFI, III, V, XI, XIV and to a much lesser extent, XIII and XV follow the old Chosen Heroes of the Crystal nonsense. Even games that had crystals prominently in them like IV and IX dropped the chosen heroes aspect and kept the crystals more as MacGuffin to fight over. What was amusing about 4HoL is that the party is fairly dismissive about being the chosen ones, and it takes half the game for them to all finally grow into the role they were givens as opposed to just accepting it and trying to do good. Hell, one of the biggest story beats involves the party trying to convince the previous Hero of Light to get off his ass and do his job.
Yeah, in that regard the crystals in BD are played more straight, since they’re benevolent forces of nature here, but there’s still a nice deconstructive twist here. Namely, the crystals don’t exactly communicate with the party at all, with just one character actually having some sort of connection to them, but still the party is left to mostly figure out what to do and how to do it on their own, with this sort of decisiveness and dealing with the consequences of your decisions being a main theme. I always like to think that FF started deconstructing crystals much later, as far as VI and VII. Magicite and Materia may not be exactly the same but they are stand-ins for the crystals and their very existence and the way the parties use them presents an ethical or even moral dilemma that just wasn’t there in previous FFs.
It is a bit rough around the edges. It's interesting how SE was on a weird bent in the late 00s for deconstructing the series crystal motif. I mean the FNC can pretty much be summarized as "Crystals choose Light Warriors, but the Crystals are all not-so-secretly jerks". 4HoL does something similar but in its case, "Crystals choose Light Warriors, but their choices are jerks" so it's kind of interesting from that point of view.
Yeah, BD is much more straightforwardly aping FFIII and FFV in that regard. I’m still curious to play 4HoL, but it’s kind of hard to get ahold of nowadays.
4HoL does a weird thing where levels matter a lot in the early game, but after a certain story beat, they will actually start scaling with you. At that point, how many levels of your job, and your gear become more important. The unique aspect of 4HoL's Job system is the opposite of BD and most job systems SE does where the classes are hardly dominating without a support class or two to work things out. Black Mage may be the one exception and once you gain the Lux spell, White Mage does become a permanent fixture of the team. Of anything, it's the melee focused classes that are really nerfed in this game. There is no Warrior class for instance, and the few good melee classes unlock near the end of the game and are usually hiding behind superbosses.
